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Extending further and refining Prince’s taxonomy of given/new information
- Source :
- Pragmatics, Pragmatics, 2013, 23 (1), pp.69-91. ⟨10.1075/prag.23.1.04loo⟩
- Publication Year :
- 2022
- Publisher :
- John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2022.
-
Abstract
- International audience; The aim of this article is to complement and refine Ellen Prince's well-known taxonomy of given/new information (Prince 1981, 1992), which distinguishes between discourse-related and assumed familiarity-related newness/givenness. What we suggest is that a new category should be added to the existing hearer new, hearer old, and inferrable information categories, so as to include cases where the informational status of an entity or a propositional content cannot be determined with certainty. We call this new category 'the (hearer) indeterminables', and we justify its existence through a case study on non-restrictive, relevance oriented constructions (appositive relative clauses, non-restrictive pre-modifiers, apposition). We also argue that it is possible for speakers/writers to simulate informational statuses for politeness considerations, and that such simulation should be included in the definition of assumed familiarity.
- Subjects :
- Linguistics and Language
media_common.quotation_subject
Relevance
Language and Linguistics
Politeness
Prince's taxonomy
030507 speech-language pathology & audiology
03 medical and health sciences
Taxonomy (general)
Foreground/background
Relevance (information retrieval)
Sociology
Given/new information
[SHS.LANGUE]Humanities and Social Sciences/Linguistics
media_common
060201 languages & linguistics
Informational status
Apposition
06 humanities and the arts
Certainty
Linguistics
Philosophy
0602 languages and literature
Complement (linguistics)
Non-restrictive
0305 other medical science
Relative clauses
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 24064238 and 10182101
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....3787f8cf27f59debfa7ea40bd62559ef
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.23.1.04loo